Re: Geary accessibility

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

I recently tried Geary, Sylpheed, Claws-mail, Balsa and Evolution. All
have various issues that make them nearly unusable with Orca. Balsa is
one of the best other than Thunderbird, but it's hard to read a message
once it's open. The message shows up in a read-only textbox, but the
arrow keys don't work. Everything else works as expected, although the
message list could be just a little less verbose.

Regarding Geary, I had many of the same problems as described by the OP.
Sylpheed still has an unreadable message list, but I am able to compose
a message, although coming from Thunderbird, that shift+control+e
keyboard shortcut to send a message is a bit counterintuitive, as I'm
used to pressing control+enter to send the composed message. I also
can't open a message in Sylpheed. I like opening messages in their own
windows/tabs, but Sylpheed makes this impossible, or nearly so. Once I
did find a message, I was only able to read portions of it from
something like a preview pane, and couldn't get it into a separate
window or tab. Claws-mail worked, or didn't work, in much the same ways
as Sylpheed. The unreadable message list is also still a problem in the
latest stable version of Evolution, 3.12.3 as of this post. I must
wonder just how hard it could be to render a message list that can be
read by Orca. If it's anything like what I was seeing in some of the
MATE code that had to be done to create accessible objects and make them
speak, I can certainly understand how easy it can be to get it wrong, as
it appears that nearly everything has to be done twice, i.e. the object
has to be created, and then a second accessible object has to be created
in order to speak the first object. That is unless I somehow misread the
code. I'm not all that familiar with how gtk code is supposed to look,
so I could be way off about that part.

For now, the best solution I've found for reading mail is Thunderbird
nightly builds. They are far more usable than any other graphical
client, including the stable Thunderbird builds. They fixed the problem
where the wrong message was being spoken once a message was deleted from
the list, so the entire experience with Thunderbird nightly is much more
smooth. At this point, I would recommend pulling down a nightly build of
Thunderbird, as it's the best thing going for now, at least until some
of the issues with other clients are fixed.
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk/
-- 
"Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?"
Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"